I disagree with most of this on a base level. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, December 26, 2017, 16:34 (2373 days ago) @ Harmanimus

The party sizes not being interchangeable between pvp and pve activities

Mildly frustrating, but outside of changing between activities having a mild hump in it that really doesn’t impact most follow-on activities or the motivation to complete “one more.” Does only having 4 people in a PvP match make you not play more PvP because your fireteam can’t all do a Nightfall, or you don’t have enough for a Raid? Is that an actual cause for you?

yes.

including power level as a meaningless statistic that is still capped for reasons unknown

Motivating numbers. I mean, that is in many ways what Blizzard game progression is anyway. People like to grow numbers. And that next Public Event possibly dropping an Exotic keeps people chasing. A cycling cap encourages people who aren’t trying to play 16 hours a day everyday that they, too, can accomplish what is the current end.

Destiny 1 had a max level PvP endgame that was interesting, challenging, and compelling, which Destiny 2 currently lacks. The loss is huge for me.

and having both character and monster levels interacting in ways that undermine their natural ability to regulate difficulty level

And this is one of those things I have a base level disagreement with. In fact, most of your examples of regulated difficulty are actually unregulated difficulty with arbitrary suppositions regarding play-to-enjoyment ratios which I am not sure are particularly common.

In fact, the uplift of all enemies to match a baseline equivalent power seems more like something that naturally regulates difficulty. And having separate content wih higher powered enemies and modifiers (which are admittedly under utilized in D2) have always been a strength of difficulty increase in Destiny.

Why have monster levels and player levels if you aren't going to play the two against one another to find dynamic difficulty? That's my whole point. Destiny doesn't take any advantage of this interplay even though it has levels, AND it lacks difficulty selection even though the baseline difficulty is enforced upon the player. It's poor design in my opinion.